Anthropic Solutions - Is There a Multiverse?

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i'm willing to consider anthropic solutions myself, although i share your disappointment that we can't get a unique solution to these things. Ah, but you need kind of a multiverse, a lot of different possibilities out there, and then you look for the little subset where e can live, right? So what weinberg had in mind was something like the possibility that there is this multiverse, that there are many possible universes. And in some of those, most of those, there won't be stars or galaxies, much less people. In some very small subset, he said, there will be the ulgrow structure, you will develop the galaxy, stars, planets and so on

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet, there are strong indications from theoretical considerations and cosmological data that we need to do better. But the leading contenders, especially supersymmetry, haven’t yet shown up in our experiments, leading some to wonder whether anthropic selection is a better answer. Michael Dine gives us an expert’s survey of the current situation, with pointers to what might come next.

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Michael Dine received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University. He is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his awards are fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Physical Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Sakurai Prize for theoretical particle physics. His new book is This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist’s Journey to the Edge of Reality.

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